As late as 1870, the sole occupants of what is now the incorporated Village of Lake Placid were two farms on Mirror Lake and a sawmill on Mill Pond. Beginning in 1800 a considerable colony had grown up on the outskirts, in the outlying town of North Elba, but it was not until 1850 that the village's first settler ventured up to the shores of Mirror Lake, then known as Bennet's Pond.

In that year of 1850 Joseph Vernon Nash, who had come to North Elba with his family in 1840 at the age of 13, bought a wild and hilly tract on the west side of Mirror Lake. He built a three-room cabin on the lake shore, married Harriet Brewster, and hacked a great farm out of the wilderness. Soon he erected a frame house above the cabin, where the Hilton's Lakeside annex now stands, and bought more land to the south. An outlay of $480 had netted him 320 choice acres. His farm now included all of present Main Street from the Hilton down to the Central School, all of Grand View Hill and some of Signal Hill.

By the 1850's tourists were already making an appearance on the farm roads of North Elba. Writers, artists, mountain climbers and sportsmen, seeking a bed and a sojourn among the wonders of the wild, were pounding on Joe Nash's door. Joe put an addition on his red house and turned innkeeper. For the next 20 years Nash's Red House would be a popular rural haven for the spiralling summer tourist trade.

In 1852 Nash's brother-in-law Benjamin Brewster had bought the Great Lot north of the Nash tract, bordering Mirror Lake and encompassing the major part of Signal Hill. He, too, carved a substantial farm out of the wilderness.

This, then, was the Village of Lake Placid in 1870.

Ben Brewster had long envied the success of his brother-in-law's little farmhouse inn. In 1871 he built a small, primitive hotel just north of the present Mirror Lake Inn. Joe Nash followed suit in 1876, raising another summer hotel, the Excelsior House, on the ridge above his Red House. Sold to John Stevens in 1878, it was to evolve into the famous Stevens House.

Plenty of outsiders were now casting a covetous eye on the Nash farmland, and Joe was beginning to understand its vast potential. In the 1870's he gave up farming and the tourist trade and went into the real estate business, selling off lots from his great holdings.

One of the first to acquire a slice of Joe's pie was Moses Ferguson. Either by luck or design, he chose the prime acreage at the top of the Nash farm hill, overlooking lakes Mirror and Placid. It commanded what probably were and are the most spectacular mountain views in all the Adirondacks, the surrounding country predominately wilderness. Only 20 years before, Joe Nash had trapped a panther on the very spot where Ferguson in 1877 erected a little hotel aptly named the "Grand View". A small, plain but tidy building, it boasted three stories capped with an observation lookout and an encircling veranda amply stocked with rocking chairs.

Two more hotels soon rose on the slope of the hill below the Grand View and opposite the present post office - in 1880 the Allen House (dubbed "mammoth" by a contemporary county newspaper), and in 1883 the Mirror Lake House, eventually the largest and most luxurious of its time. The infant village emerging from a wilderness now had five well-frequented houses of accommodation and a Main Street that sprang up along Joe Nash's cow path.

Henry Allen, proprietor of the Allen House, was, like many another pioneer Adirondack hotel-keeper, originally a farmer. Born in Ripton, Vermont in 1848, he was one of five brothers who fought in the Civil War. Arriving in the Lake Placid area in the spring of 1874, the young man hired out to a North Elba farmer and soon married the farmer's daughter.

Simple farmer or no, Henry Allen was a born entrepreneur, sensing at once which way the wind was blowing up on the hill off Mirror Lake. In 1876 he rented Ben Brewster's small hotel, ran it for three years, and then built his own Allen House, at the same time operating a stage line between Lake Placid and Ausable Forks. In 1885 he even erected a telephone line from the Allen House to Saranac Lake.

Moses Ferguson's Grand View was having its ups and downs. "Mose", as he was called (nothing was known of him beyond his name), seems not to have been suited to the tourist-catering business. For a couple of years he ran the Grand View himself. In 1880 rented it out to Andrew J. Daniel and H.C. Lyon (a clergyman), and then failed financially. The property passed under mortgage default to Reuben Clifford of Lake Placid. Henry Allen rented the Grand View beginning in 1881 and soon purchased it, running it in conjunction with his Allen House - a propitious move, for his Allen House burned down in 1886 and was never rebuilt.

In the same year of 1886 Henry Allen's good name, as well as that of the Grand View, was enhanced and secured for all time. That summer no less personage than the President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, spent part of a belated honeymoon at the Grand View with his bride of two months, Miss Frances Folsom of Buffalo. Their previous attempt at a wedding trip in Maryland had ended abruptly, bedevilled by the intrusions of newshounds who had even invaded their living quarters.

Starting for the Adirondacks on August 16th, Cleveland wrote to a friend, "One thing is certain, if the newspapermen get there, I shall leave." If the newsmen did indeed prowl about the Grand View, they evidently left the couple in peace for a happy time was reported by the President and his First Lady at that small hotel with its large views.

In 1894 the opulent Mirror Lake House burned to the ground, leaving the Grand View the sole public house on the hill which, in the natural order of things, had come to bear the same name.

Lake Placid was rapidly expanding and Henry Allen, a man of broad vision, had already, before 1893, built another hotel of considerable size tight beside the original Grand View. The two buildings were united, greatly extended, and heightened. The final result was, next to the Stevens House, the largest, most gracious and imposing place of accommodation in the now internationally recognized summer resort of Lake Placid. No substantial outer alterations were made in after years.

From the start, the ingenious Allen's new creation was imminently successful. His bill of fare rivalled that of the finest New York restaurants. The story is told that one night in 1897 the renowned hotelier Paul Smith of St. Regis Lake, a rough-hewn Adirondack original who inspired many a legendary tale, came to the Grand View to sample one of its famous dinners. For dessert he took only custard pie. Allen was in the kitchen when out came Smith's waitress laughing uncontrollably. She was finally able to gasp, "That old gentleman took the custard pie up in his hands to eat it."

The appointments of the Grand View were lavish and the dernier cri. It had an elevator, of the hydraulic type and operated by an enormous steam pump (curiously, the steam pump was not replaced by an electric motor until the 1920's, although electricity had come to Lake Placid in 1905). Henry inaugurated the hotel's permanent policy of engaging a summer orchestra for dancing and musicals in the great ballroom. Tennis courts were provided and all manner of entertainment devised to divert a prosperous, worldly and eminent clientele. Strolling paths were cut through the hotel woods down to the outlet of Lake Placid and little summerhouses sprouted up along them.

One problem that plagued all the early hotel owners was water. There was water, water everywhere, as far as the eye could see, but no conventional waterworks to service their large-scale requirements. If anyone was equal to the challenge, it was Henry Allen. As early as 1881 he built a dam on the outlet of Lake Placid, some distance down the hill in back of the Grand View. With the installation of a hydraulic ram, a wealth of sparkling Adirondack water was pumped up the hill through an elaborate pipeline to the Allen House. The Mirror Lake House hooked on to the system.

For the Grand View, Henry built a 30 by 40 foot reservoir, surrounded by an ornamental iron fence, directly in back of the hotel. Subsequently, so plentiful was the supply that Henry went into the waterworks business with Byron Brewster and began to provide the surplus commodity to parts of the growing village.

Had it not been for the cunning Stevens brothers, John and George, hosts of the rival Stevens House over on Signal Hill, this idyllic state of affairs might have continued indefinitely. But the Stevenses cannily built a second dam on the outlet upriver from Henry Allen's, installed pump, piped a goodly supply of water to a reservoir at the Stevens House, and also began to sell surplus to the villagers. The community now had a water system of sorts, served by two separate waterworks.

Lake Placid's famous "War of the Waterworks" began in earnest. Allen and Brewster soon found to their chagrin that the Stevenses, with a pump and dam further upstream controlled by the temper of the owners, could take the bulk of the water, causing severe shutdowns in the partners' system. The partners sought a solution by tapping a brook near Whiteface Inn and laying 7 miles of 4-inch pipe, the water flow by force of gravity directly into the village street pipes. Much of the pipe had been laid when a stretch of State land brought by Allen and Brewster up short. The State petitioned for permission to cross the land. Brewster and Allen were outraged when, through the machinations of George Stevens, who was then serving in the State Assembly, their project was effectively quashed.

Annoying shutdowns continued and finally, at the turn of the century, Allen and Brewster were able to persuade the newly incorporated village to buy them out. Mayor John Shea and his Trustees quickly found they purchased a pig in a poke. The whole matter was resolved when the Village also bought the Stevens waterworks and, at a cost of $40,000, installed the municipal water system in operation today.

The Grand View reservoir, an empty hole, but with its ornamental iron fence intact, was still in existence some 50 years later. Now, a century later, traces of both the Allen and Stevens dam abutments are still in evidence on the outlet of Lake Placid.

In 1901 Henry Allen sold the Grand View Hotel to Thomas Parkes and built the National Hotel in the lower section of Lake Placid, which he conducted until failing health forced his retirement. The beloved and respected pioneer hotelman, also Sheriff of Essex County for three years and North Elba Supervisor for two years, died at Lake Placid in December 1916 at the age of 68. He left no children, unless one believes that the Grand View Hotel deserves that distinction.

Parkes continued the lofty traditions of the Grand View, keeping the place open from June to October, until his death in 1910, when his widow sold a half-interest to Morton B. Marshall, a native of Ticonderoga, New York. It was Parkes who established the popular baseball diamond that existed for years on Grand View grounds. The scene of lively matches between the guests and employees of the Grand View and those of rival hotels, the field was also used by the local high school and various other north country baseball teams. It was even a practice area for the Lake Placid polo team in the 1920's.

New owner Morton B. Marshall was a seasoned hotelman who up to that time had been the manager of the famous Saranac Inn over at Upper Saranac Lake. Marshall's long career in the hotel business included the Hargrave, Alexandria and St. Andrew in New York City.

Marshall sold the Grand View in 1922 to the Placid Hotel Corporation, of which Walter Arnold Ruykeyser seems to have become the principal stockholder. During his ownership the hotel was always under his personal direction. In the 1920's, Ruykeyser was instrumental in designing for the Soviet government what was to be the largest asbestos mine in the world, and lived in Russia nearly a year.

In the Ruykeyser era the hotel received a long-delayed overhauling. Lobby, public rooms and bedrooms were completely renovated. The day of grand balls had passed, and Henry Allen's splendid ballroom was converted into a cafe with orchestra for dancing. From 1931 to 1956 the old summer hostelry was under the management-ownership of the dynamic Edgar V. M. Gilbert of New York City. The Grand View could then, with the two Annexes, accommodate 400.

Gilbert loved Lake Placid and vigorously promoted it as a resort. He updated the hotel in many ways. Despite the Grand View's ripe old age and now unfashionable facade, despite the Great Depression and the gradual winding down of the hotel era, his strong and engaging personality attracted guests like a magnet.

The Grand View took on a Continental aura as a mecca for European refugees, particularly those from Hitler's Germany, during the World War II era. Gilbert made every effort to provide the customs of the lost homeland. "Afternoon coffee and Schnecken on the porch" was a featured ritual. From the broad veranda guests looked out nostalgically on a mountain landscape reminiscent of the summer retreats they once knew.

During World War II Gilbert served a stint as food director for the American Red Cross in Africa. When Lake Placid boys came into his orbit he saw to it they received special rations, and plenty of them. Following the war, he joined the firm of H. Hentz Co., New York stockbrokers, with whom he was associated until his death in 1962. He was the founder and donor of the E.V.M. Gilbert annual art awards at Brandeis University.

Edgar Gilbert closed the doors of the Grand View in 1956. They were never again opened. The times were a-changing. Guests no longer came for an entire summer season. Vacationers were bypassing the faded old Adirondack Victorian hotels for the new breed of cabins and motels. At last, vacant for several years, the once again grand edifice on Grand View Hill, sole remaining relic of Lake Placid's Golden Age of hotels, and a part of it dating back 84 years, was demolished in 1961.

"History of Grand View Hotel"

Compiled by
Mary MacKenzie, Historian,
Town of North Elba and Village of Lake Placid.